At the Venetian

AT THE VENETIAN - MACAU, 70 x 184 cm, 2010

Fujiflex Crystal Archive Gloss

There is an acute emphasis on the ‘unmediated moment’ captured in Zofia Nowicka’s At the Venetian - Macau 2010. As in her previous photographic series, Framing the Spectacle: Leonard Cohen Concert Melbourne 2009, the viewer again becomes a central participant within the event. Here, at the Venetian Casino, one becomes aware of the collective intensity of each gambler’s focus on the game ‘in hand’. Amidst the flickering pulse of light from the consoles’ screen-graphic ‘bling’, what is captured is a darkly sensuous atmosphere of condensed excess. Pleasure and apprehension.

Critical to an understanding of her images is the way in which Zofia Nowicka defines her ‘point of view’, as being immersed in the crowd: the observer being observed. There is, for the spectator, as for the scene’s participants, a palpable sensation of being enfolded within the architecture of the event. What is captured and reflected back to us in these images is the informal poetry inherent in the common ‘rituals’ of ordinary life.

Of particular interest to me is the way in which these works aesthetically cut across historical distance. We are reminded, by these lush, twenty-first-century scenes, of the fabulous extravagance of visual textures and the compositional proportions of the historic Baroque.

Approaching her subject with the ‘eye’ of a painter and the ‘touch’ of the sculptor, the material abundance associated with Baroque ‘style’ finds resonance in the way Zofia Nowicka’s compositions appear to flood outwards beyond the limits of the frame. One’s sense of spatial breadth, so palpably captured across the floor of the casino, is nevertheless arrested by the desire to look and look again. We feel compelled to linger on a mesmerising infinity of luminous detail, which creates in its intensity, a spectral, visual staccato of simultaneous ‘moments in action’, snared within the chiaroscuro shadow-play of the Venetian’s crowded gaming floor.

Janenne Eaton 2010